Five books read over the holidays, only four of which were better than that nasty jellyfish sting

As far as I'm concerned, the only reason to go on vacation (aside from that whole bonding with your family thing) is to read books. Here are the five I dog-eared, covered with sand and carried around the world over the past two weeks, in order of how much I liked them:

1)  The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb

This book, which will be out in April, is another masterpiece by the author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. "Black Swans" are rare, unpredictable and high-impact events--practically everything important, in other words. Taleb's point is that most of the world is built around bell-curve assumptions of predictability (averages, standard-deviation, etc), even as it's actually increasingly dominated by powerlaws, which make averages meaningless. You'll realize that everything you learned in Stats 101 is misleading. Mindblowing.

2)  Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger

The author (or co-author) of such classics as The Cluetrain Manifestoand Small Pieces Loosely Joined is back with another spot-on insight into what's really different about our digital age. It will be out in May and yes, that's my blurb on the cover: "The world is messy, like it or not, and it's only going to get messier as the Web destroys rules and rule-makers. You can either complain about the chaos and wish for the good old days of order, or you can buy this book and understand why delirious disorder will soon make us all smarter."

3) Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

I know: I can't believe I haven't read this already. But I pretty much stopped reading fiction after high school and this came out in 1985. I decided to read it in parallel with my 9-year-old, and it works very well for both generations. The idea of genius kids who are being trained with videogames, not knowing that they're actually commanding real armies, is a classic. Less recognized is that Card anticipated blogs, too, with his anonymous digital pamphleteers using fiery rhetoric to rise to power. We're now turning to some of the other books in this long-running series.

4) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.

In truth, I only skimmed this one, although I intend to come back to it and read it properly. Don Tapscott has great instincts (Growing Up Digital was his early and prescient look at how technology's real impact moves at a generational pace) and I agree with him entirely on the profound importance of open collaboration. From what I've seen so far, this looks very good. Also skimmed with intention to return was The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, which also appears promising.

5) A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman

What a disappointment. I was really looking forward to this, since I've been banging on for some time about how the web is inherently messy: a little slop at the microscale is the price you pay for extraordinary power at the macroscale. As David Weinberger says far better in his book above, our human craving for order makes fuzzy statistical systems counterintuitive. But that's our problem, not theirs. I'd hoped that A Perfect Mess would focus on the web and other information systems, but instead it actually does what its subhed promises: looks mostly at desks, closets and other personal organizational habits. This may lead to a lucrative speaking and consulting career reassuring those with too much clutter, but it makes for a pretty pedestrian read for anyone looking for something more intellectually challenging.

 

Comments

[Yehuda Berlinger]

Ender's Game's sequels: I wouldn't bother. The first, Children of the Mind, contains a few nice ideas, but like so many other authors, he progressively loses his ability to write as he goes along. The plots remain good, but the writing becomes worse and worse. This seems to happen with a lot of sci-fi and fantasy authors, in my experience.

Yehuda

[Sanne Roemen]

I bumped in to book nr 5 today. Picked it up because of the cover. Put it back down when I read the flap stating it was about not getting organized. Uhm, so what I don't understand is how you can be dissapointed, since the flap is so clear about what to expect when you read it? It doesn't say 'this is about the web being a messy place'.
Re the other books you read: wow I can't wait till they hit the stores!!!! Thanks for the raves. Am reading the starfish right now and indeed: it's worth going on vacation for again (soon!)

[Graeme Watson]

I wonder if when 'Back Swans' is released on the West Coast of Australia it'll be re-titled 'White Swans', here Black Swans are so damn common they are on our state's flag.

[Eric]

Ditto the poster above on the "Ender" sequels. They're not worth it. Card gets increasingly preachy in the "Speaker for the dead" arc (Yeah, we get that you're a Mormon Card) and the writing kind of falls apart by the end in either case. The "Ender's Shadow" arc is just a weak story.

It's a shame, because Ender's Game really was a brilliant novel.

[Chris Anderson]

Sanne,

I'd pre-ordered it from Amazon months ago, before the flap was available to be read. I suppose more research would have revealed that they were heading down an uninteresting path, but I was so interested in messiness that I was hoping for the best.

Chris

[John Wesley]

Ender's Game is great book. I read all the rest in the series during my big Orson Scott Card period. When I heard of blogging it immediately made me think of the way Peter and Valentine use the net to gain influence. Do you think bloggers will ever really get that much power?

[Sanne Roemen]

Ah ok. I get it. I think I might have fallen for it too. I'll keep my eyes open if I find a book about the messyness of the web I'll let you know!

[John Chrisoulakis]

In Australia - black swans are common. A few years back on a visit to Japan I was showing some locals a book on Tasmanian and Australian fauna and they were shocked to see pictures of a black swan. They explained that their name for swan is literally "white bird". Talk about cognitive dissonance: black-white bird!

[Ben]

Glad you enjoyed Ender's Game, Chris--but that's my personal copy! You better have not dog-eared it or filled it with TOO much sand! But I jest--and in opposition to the rest of the posters, I DO recommend the rest of the Ender's Game books. The direct sequels are yes, very strange, and yes, not brilliantly written. However, they're very interesting reads and I enjoyed them. I also recommend the Ender's Shadow books. They're much more character driven stories and geopolitics and not much sci-fi, but they're still great reads. Maybe I'm just an OSC fanboy, but I recommend the later books.

~Duk

[Adam Jusko]

Reviewed Wikinomics here.

Interesting read. I thought it was going to be overly focused on collaborative Web sites that make no money, but a lot focuses on big companies and non-techy companies that are using new collaborative models to actually make earnings (unlike many social media Web sites).

I have A Perfect Mess sitting on my desk & I hope I have a different impression of it than you or I'll be wasting my time. Although my desk is a disaster, so I'm hoping it will make me feel better about that.

[Mary Warner]

Here's a book suggestion for those of you long-tailers out there trying to get attention. I, too, found this over the holiday break, it having just been released. It's called "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Chip & Dan Heath. The authors were inspired to write it after reading Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point."

[Jonathan Potts]

I'm curious as to why you gave up fiction for so long. It seems like a lot of people say that they don't read fiction.

[Ed Yourdon]

Like others, I'm delighted that you found the "Ender's Game" series; by all means, do read at least the next couple of items in the series ...after the third or fourth, they start to get a little strange. But make sure you also read another of Orson Scott Card's fabulous sci-fi books: "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus." It's mind-blowing...

[Chris Anderson]

Jonathan,

I'm busy and fiction counts as an indulgence, something I have too little time for (I don't watch TV, either, for the same reason). Plus, I find made-up stuff just not as stimulating as the amazing ideas and learning that reality offers. That said, I miss fiction and hope to come back to it when I've got more time someday.

My only real entertainment indulgence is videogames, and I only play them with the kids (I claim that counts as bonding time)

Chris